Environmental programs fall victim to budget cuts

In South Carolina, they mean health officials will not perform a statewide study of how mercury-tainted fish affect those who eat them. Contaminated fish have been found in some 1,700 miles of the state’s rivers. That state’s Department of Natural Resources’ budget was cut more than 50 percent, dropping to $14 million from $32 million.

The state Department of Environmental Protection in Pennsylvania has seen general fund support slip from $217 million in 2009 to $140 million, levels last seen in 1994.

“This is a silent train wreck that’s happening,” said David Hess, the former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. “What these cuts do is cut the capacity and the ability of environmental agencies to do their jobs.”

At best, states will know less about how their air and water quality are faring. At worst, they could become dirtier and more dangerous places to live, Hess said.

Oregon, for example, reduced air pollution monitoring, as the Department of Environmental Quality faces budget cuts through 2013. In North Carolina, lawmakers eliminated a $480,000 mapping program created after a landslide killed five people in 2004, jettisoning the jobs of six geologists who said more maps were needed to help protect Appalachian mountain residents by helping them decide where it is safe to build.

“It’s very shortsighted,” said DJ Gerken, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Ashville, N.C. “We’ve had 48 landslide deaths since 1916. What’s changed is the appetite for building in these areas where risks are most abundant.”

In some cases, it’s difficult to know what effect the spending cuts will have over the long term because environmental problems often evolve over time.

When Washington’s Legislature trimmed $30 million, or 27 percent, from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s budget, three employees who had been diving in the Puget Sound to hunt down invasive sea squirts lost their jobs.

The gelatinous invaders, known as tunicates, form a goopy mat on the sea floor, raising fears that they will hurt the shellfish industry, as they have in eastern Canada.

While the state’s oyster growers will not rule out the potential for future problems caused by the sea squirts, they say they do not see an immediate threat to their livelihoods.

“There isn’t any place I’m aware of that the tunicates are causing harm on the shellfish farms,” said Bill Dewey, of Taylor Shellfish Farms in Shelton, Wash.

Elsewhere, budget cuts to invasive species programs have caused more alarm.

The Hawaii Invasive Species Council, a main player in that state’s fight against non-native plants and animals, saw its budget cut by more than half to $1.8 million.

Fearing “a collapse of our inspection capacity,” spokeswoman Deborah Ward said her agency redirected 40 percent of its remaining money to preserve inspections that help keep invasive pests such as brown tree snakes from hitchhiking their way into the islands from Guam. Hawaii has no native snakes, so experts fears their arrival could decimate native bird species.

As the money was shifted, however, the state cut back on field crews who targeted invasive species already on the islands. Those include pigs, wild goats and sheep that can decimate an ecosystem full of plants that evolved without natural protections, like thorns.

“They’re like bonbons for pigs,” Christy Martin, a spokeswoman for the Coordinating Group on Alien Pest Species in Honolulu, said of the state’s native plants. “If there’s nobody out there actually doing the work, you get astronomical reproduction. We have a year-round breeding season here, so everything goes crazy, and you lose ground.”